A tall medical bill is often met with perplexity, helplessness, and a lot of questions on the lines of what charges are included, why the drugs are so expensive and so on.
Max Healthcare CMD Abhay Soi clarified, that in the case of hospitals providing medicines, the cost reflected is not purely of just one thing.
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In an interview with NDTV Profit, he explained how the cost of special medicines, specifically chemotherapy drugs, involves a chain of storage, cold-chain management, drug mixing, administration, monitoring and disposal protocols governed by NABH standards.
The debate, he emphasised, should not focus solely on the sticker price of a medicine, but on the broader cost of delivering it safely. "The handling of cytotoxic chemotherapy drugs is potentially hazardous to the healthcare professionals and patients," he stated.
Therefore, he elucidated how there are standard operating procedures for the entire steps in the value chain including mixing of the cytotoxic drugs, adding that 95% of chemotherapy drugs are mixed.
"These are mixed in laminar flow rooms...They are mixed and then apportioned to patients," he outlined. Therefore, the cost of these drugs includes the cost of the entire value chain in a hospital, the Max Healthcare CMD stated.
"There are lots of costs across the system including resident doctors, doctors, and the entire coverage that you provide which is not necessarily dedicated into every item,"
Further, he clarified that hospitals are not selling these medicines, they are administering them.
"We don't sell chemotherapy drugs alone. We administer the drugs. We don't sell injections. We administer the injections," Soi emphasied, adding that the product cost generally includes the cost of administration as well.
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